Rome and the School (part II)

He
summarized, as Giotto did, an imperishable moment. It is he who was that
equilibrium for which Italy had been seeking with so much anguish, and which
the passionate clash of sensibility and intelligence prevented the crowd from
realizing. One cannot help placing these two minds alongside of each other.
Undoubtedly, Raphael is, with Giotto, the only one in the history of painting
who invades all our faculties of reason and feeling with that profound
gentleness. To tell the truth, it is his science that dominates; he has not the
direct force that gives to the decorator of Padua and of Assisi a more virile
tone, a more joyous candor, a more peaceful faith in that which he recounts
upon the walls. But one does not know, when one looks at the sibyls or the
frescoes of the Vatican, whether it is heroes or saints that one has before
one's eyes, martyrs or philosophers, Virgins or Venuses, Jewish gods or pagan
gods; one feels that the forms harmonize with and penetrate one another, that
colors call and answer one another; an undulation of harmonies that seems to
have no beginning and no ending runs through one without meeting the least
resistance and leaves one only the strength to hearken to the prolongation in
oneself of the echo aroused by their memory.

What
does he mean, and where has he seen such a union of everything that is matter
and everything that is thought, everything that is feminine tenderness and
everything that is male strength, everything that is the certitude of the races
which have felt much and that is the wavering faith of the centuries which
desire knowledge? He studied, inattentively perhaps, what had been done before
him and what was being done around him; he seemed scarcely to look at the
infinitely profound and multiple world of movements, colors, and forms; he gave
ear to the sounds about him and breathed in the perfume of flowers and of women
with that indifferent fervor that belongs only to a being who sees harmony
springing from his very footsteps and love approaching him without his having
summoned it; all of this he united in himself as in a sonorous center, without
too closely investigating its source; and the whole of it, after having melted
unresistingly at the hearth of his sentiment, came forth from him in waves as
full, as calm, and as difficult to resist as the mysterious rhythm that governs
the beating of hearts; that causes the seasons to be born, to die, and to be
reborn; that causes the sun to burst forth and sink each morning and each
evening. Long after the death of Raphael, Michael Angelo, even though he had
not loved him, was perhaps thinking of the younger man more than of himself
when he said : "Beautiful painting is religious in itself, for the soul is
lifted up by the effort that it has to make to attain perfection and to mingle
with God: beautiful painting is an effect of that divine perfection, a shadow
from the brush of God; it is a music, a melody. Very lofty intelligences alone
can grasp it."

Raphael
is one of the most calumniated men in history, and calumniated by those who
have been loudest in their praise. The inexhaustible youth that shines from him
has been ascribed to the fact that he died young, but it is accentuated in one
work after another; and if he had lived to be very old it would not have ceased
to renew itself, because it had existed before him and was to survive him, even
as the spring-times and the autumns, which continue to produce despite the
winters heaped up upon them. The ease with which he seizes upon a thousand
objects, a thousand scattered facts of life, of nature, of history, of art,
which he did not in himself produce, for the purpose of organizing them into
harmonious images where nothing of the objects and of the original facts
subsists save the lofty emotion which they called forth—all has given rise to
the charge of an almost shocking propensity to assimilate and to imitate his
work. And because one must follow his work step by step and make an effort
oneself in order to appreciate the meaning of the effort which he had to expend
in order to raise Perugian "piety pictures" to the level of the
generalizations of the Vatican and the Farnesine, people have wondered, in a
dull way, at his skill. Copious tears have been shed over the hundred Virgins,
that are often so sugary—and for the most part unauthentic—that issued from his
studio, so that one almost forgets the twenty portraits which make him, with
Titian, the greatest Italian painter of character and which cause us to feel,
rising from the senses to the mind of this all-powerful youth, a force of construction
in depth which would have made him an Italian Rembrandt had he lived thirty
years longer.

There
was in this painter, molded in his very flesh which yet never ceased its
adoration, a little of the bronze of the armor which the fighters of that time
left off to don the habits of the court. He sculptured the long bony hands with
the golden bands of their rings and the pure dense planes of the faces with the
polished skeleton covered by their muscles. "Julius II, " "Bindo
Altoviti," "Inghirami," "Leo X," and "Maddalena
Doni" are of those absolute forms which dwell wholly in the memory, as if,
throughout their entire surface, they reach the inner walls of the skull. Their
mind is made of the same metal as themselves; it escapes neither through the eyes
nor through the gestures, but is enclosed within the block they make, calm in
the depth of the dull magnificence which the movement of the reds gives to the
bare background, to the arm chairs, to the carpets, to the robes, to the air
itself, and to the reflections on the clean-shaven faces. The blacks are so
pure that they seem to light up the red shadow. He has tones that are opaque,
blacks and reds, and these stand almost alone, abandoned to themselves, like a
mineral which has become quite solidified at the bottom of a stone crucible.
And yet these tones penetrate one another; they have their profound harmonies,
and are full and compact like the forms which they create. There is no power in
art that surpasses the power of these portraits, red cardinals on white mules
harnessed with red, great bodies dressed in green or in black which kneel
gravely, figures of authority or of violence, figures of youth also, of pride,
of enthusiasm, isolated in their strength or bursting forth here and there in
the vast compositions like wide-opened flowers on the surface of water that
ebbs and flows.

This
endless ebb and flow, which Giotto had understood, and which proceeds from the
pediments of the temples of Greece and Sicily to the paintings of Raphael by
way of the combinations of lines of the Arab decorators, is the whole
Mediterranean ideal. Italy had been seeking it ever since Masaccio, because it
was he who wrote into the surface of his frescoes the intelligence of the
world, that sense of continuity which the succession of planes imposes on our
instinct, but which does not suffice to reveal its nature to our mind, eager
for clearly stated reasons and for exact demonstration. It is the arabesque,
the rational expression of the living form, that the straight line, which is
death, could not translate and from which the too metaphysical absolute of the
circular line would exclude all possibility of renewal and of movement; only
curved lines, undulating and continuous, can describe the living form in its
flux and reflux, its flights and its downfalls, its repose and its effort,
still leaving to each of the elements that it unites in a common life its
personality and its function. It was through the arabesque that Raphael defined
and realized the intellectual and sensual ideal which the Renaissance demanded,
when the means for the social ideal which the Middle Ages had embodied in their
life was exhausted. With Raphael, the passage from form to form is as subtle as
it is from color to color, in the case of the Venetians or even Velasquez,
Consider, in the "Heliodorus," the huddled group of terrified
mothers, their children in their arms. Consider, in the "Parnassus,"
the concatenation of the musical rhythm, the intertwining groups of the women,
the union, as if in a marriage, their graces which blend, their gentle heads
inclined toward each other as they look over the rounded shoulders from which
their bare arms flow with a single movement. Consider, above all, the fresco of
the "Sibyls" or that of the "Jurisprudence," where the
forms are so well adapted to the surfaces to be decorated that they seem to
give birth to those surfaces through their volumes and their directions.
Consider how one gesture explains another and compels a reply; how tresses,
heads, arms, and shoulders affirm, in the effortless combination of the curves
of their attitudes, that there is in nature not a single inert or living form
that is not bound up with all the others; consider how the mind is led without
a halt from one end of life to the other. With Raphael, the line of the
Florentines, which was born and kept alive with so much difficulty, frees
itself, and defines on the surface and realizes in depth the succession of the
planes and the continuity of the modeling; and, in a harmony where the grays and
the reds, the greens, the blacks, the lilacs, and the silver-whites yield
themselves to the humble substance of the walls which fixes them forever, the
unity of expression of line, mass, and color is affirmed for the first time.

It is
in this that we seek the reason for the power which Raphael has exercised over
all the painters of modern Europe, even when they had seen him only through
copies or engravings, even when they did not love him. Upon the mind of men,
for whom the world of forms is the revealer of the world of ideas, he imprints
a mark sinuous and precise whose significance one must know if one is to follow
it without peril. If he had brought into painting no more than an attempt to
return to the ideal of the antique, as in the pagan figures of the Farnesine,
where the beautiful nude divinities, framed by heavy garlands of foliage, of
fruits, and pot-herbs, recall the abundant strength of the decorators of
Pompeii, which in turn offer such a wealth of other lessons besides, he would
not be Raphael. He would be, with Michael Angelo and before Sodoma, only the
most brilliant initiator of that plastic rhetoric which misled Italy and from
which all of Europe was to suffer. But his glory was to affirm that
individualism could not live in the desert, that, for the greater harmony of
the spirit, it must find some way of demonstrating the need that men have to
define the relationship among the universal forms when the conditions of their
existence have not permitted them to find that relationship in the social bond
itself. The arabesque is the translation into plastics of the highest
individualism.

The
crowds of the north have no need of it; the Gothic men scarcely suspected its
existence. To understand this one must have tasted of the spectacle of the worshipers
in a cathedral of the north and in an Italian basilica. The northern crowd is
united by a single sentiment; whether it is sincere or factitious is of no
importance. It stands up, sits down, and kneels at the same moments and with
the same gestures, the men on one side, the women on the other. All the heads
are on the same level, all the faces look toward the same point. The bond is
invisible, but present. Feeling is what makes these people respond all at once
to the sentimental appeal which comes from the priest, from the singing, or
from the organ. In Italy, the men and the women mingle. Some remain standing,
others are seated, some look at the altar, others turn their backs to it,
groups form and melt away again, people walk about the church, and conversations
arise or are interrupted. Each one is there for himself, each one is hearkening
only to the passion that brought him here, the mystic exaltation, the sorrow,
the hatred, the love, the curiosity, or the admiration, and it is that alone
which determines his gesture, makes him sit down or arise, walk about or remain
motionless, which carries him to his knees, with a child erect in his arms, or
makes him prostrate himself upon the pavement, against which he strikes his
forehead. There is no people in Europe less Christian than this one, which is
why the Church had to be organized here in order to maintain an appearance of
solidarity, as opposed to the individual. Italian Catholicism is a social
arabesque.

That is
the reason, also, why the plastic arabesque was born of the meditation of the
painters of this country. Since our nature requires a harmony so powerful that
in order to satisfy it we are willing to pass through sorrow, and since we did
not find the desired harmony in the sentiment of the multitudes, it was indeed
necessary for us to unite the separate beings —erect, kneeling, or laid low by
the wind of warring passions—in a single line, sinuous, firm, and
uninterrupted, a line that should not permit a single one among them to escape
from the living harmony which was divined by the senses of the artists and
which was created by their will.

Moreover,
when one surveys Italy, as one comes out from the Tuscan hills, from the Roman
circus, from the Lombard plains, and as one goes from one height to another,
one sees that the whole country undulates like the sea. Whether seen from above
and from afar, when one forgets the convulsions of the earth and the tempests
of passion in the souls of men, everything in Italy shows the necessity for her
returning to herself: the outlines of the mountains, the ramparts of the high
hills which lead the cities built upon them down to the plains by the winding
roads; the cities themselves tell the same tale with their steeply sloping
streets that separate like a river, pass under the cradle of the old vaults,
and seem to caress the walls with the ebbing of their bare pavements; and we
see this character of Italy again in its language, a golden liquid flowing over
iron sands, and we see it in the history of the country, in the even light,
that emanates from it although it has passed, almost without transition, during
thirty centuries, from the proudest summits to the most barren depths. . . And
there is something of all of this in the genius of Raphael Sanzio of Urbino.

And yet
something is lacking. The decorative compositions do not always respond to the
central principle of art, which is to bear witness to life regardless of the
pretext for it and of the fate which is reserved for it; Raphael does not seem
to suffer from having all his acts prescribed for him and from depending on the
caprice of an old man who may die any day. And whatever the liberty given him
to express himself as he thinks best, one sees a little too clearly that he is
not his own master, and that he is not galled by the fact. It is the art of a
man who is too happy. We feel a certain lack of emotion in ourselves when we
are before his frescoes. The work of those who have suffered is a stronger wine
for us. His arabesque is often apart from himself and, despite the plenitude of
the form, its direction is not always determined by the sentiment that animates
it, and a decorative mask covers the human face. It is only just to say that he
died at the age when the majority of superior men begin to catch a glimpse of
the idea that the beauty of gesture always responds to the requirements of the
intimate movements which it interprets. There are, in some of his last
paintings, the "Sistine Madonna" and the "Heliodorus"
especially, complete envelopments of arms and of breasts, and a drama of lives
closely interwoven, which show an immense and continuous expansion of his
heart. In the "Miraculous Draught of Fishes" and in the "Fire in
the Borgo," the strength and the splendor of the gestures, which compel us
to view the human beings as statues come to life, attest his discovery of the
nobility of his mind—a nobility which the "Farnesine" attests, thanks
to the fidelity of his pupils, with an august, virile, and majestic splendor.
For a decisive realization, he would have needed ten or fifteen years more and
a greater amount of will-power to resist his tendency to squander himself
through his power of love. Doubtless, Michael Angelo would not have ceased to
hate him, since, even in Raphael's last works, in which he renders homage to
the power of his rival by yielding to his influence, Michael Angelo found a
pretext for despising him. But the unfailing esteem, in which man through his
moral ascendency holds those who are strong, would probably have given him, in
his jealousy, an opportunity to wring from Raphael even greater pride and
unity, in order to complete his subjugation. As the static art of Raphael
developed and borrowed from the universe an increasing number of elements, to
be organized into increasingly complex compositions, Michael Angelo continued
to project his dynamism farther and farther into the forms in movement, which
the formidable weight of Italian thought was precipitating into his spirit from
the depths of four centuries.